As I previously told you I’ve slowly been filling my new bookcases (yes I had to buy another one for all my treasures tapes). It’s been a slow job because I have to mark them as I go or I won’t know where they are. While doing this I came across my “Jazz Hot” tape as I call it. It’s a mixture of years’ of painstaking compilations of some of my favorite music clips from live tv and favorite movies.

It all began with the taping of Le Jazz Hot from the fantastic movie Victor/Victoria. I used to pull the tape out and play it over and over whenever I needed a boost. It was so much easier to just pull out this tape instead of rummaging around for a tapped movie. Other songs on this tape include: Cool Rider from Grease 2, Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boatfrom Guys And Dolls, Time Warp from Rocky Horror Picture Showand Page O’Hara, Richard White and Jerry Orbach singing Belle and Be Our Guest from Beauty and the Beastyears ago at The Oscars. Actually it was so long ago that I had forgotten just how long I’ve had this tape — this piece of history from my life when Bernie was little and I was a single working mother.

How I acquired the Beauty and the Beast live performance was a fluke or a lucky break. It all began when I was getting ready for work one day and overheard a radio announcer saying that her ex-husband Richard White was going to perform on the Oscars that night. Then she proceeded to explain the performers would be singing “live” – not an animated version like in the movie; so that night I taped all of the show because I didn’t know when this segment would happen.

Over the years I’ve spent many happy hours watching and singing to my special tape; so when I found it the other day I decided to once again listen and maybe sing along. Well the lousy tape player had other ideas and ate my tape! I tried and tried for hours to get it to play after I unscrambled the twisted tape and got it to properly feed along the track, but it was no use. So very reluctantly I put my cherished memories away and pulled out another tape to watch.

The next day while visiting The Kids (my son and daughter-in-law) I mentioned to Bernie what had happened and bless his little heart he understood how sad I felt over this cherished loss; so he searched on YouTube and found a recording of the 1992 Oscar performance of Page O’Hara, Richard White and the great Jerry Orbach. I was both ecstatic and melancholy — if that’s possible — because I had forgotten just how long I’d had the tapped performance. I fought back tears as I realized that Bernie had just turned 5 at the time. Who knows, perhaps that’s why my vcr ate the tape; so I could learn that life goes on whether we like it or not (if we’re lucky). Oh I almost forgot another song on that tape was The Eagles’ Get Over It. Onward…